Practical Skills Training

Above and Beyond

Selected faculty publications and presentations

We regret any omissions due to distribution deadlines. If you would like to submit a faculty accomplishment for inclusion in the next Oregon Lawyer Online, please email agreen@uoregon.edu.

John Bonine was busy in Europe this summer, combining LL.M. recruiting, academic lectures, and public service. He gave university lectures in Bahçeşehir University and Bilgi University (both in Istanbul, Turkey) and in Brandenburg Technical University (in Cottbus, Germany). He delivered a well-received lecture about fraud in environmental impact assessment at a Europe-wide conference in Wroclaw, Poland, and met with environmental lawyers in Berlin, Germany, and Kyiv, Ukraine. He also participated in an international conference on environmental impacts of dams in Istanbul and a training session on organizational leadership in Kyiv. In mid-June, he was in Geneva, Switzerland, participating as an expert in the Access to Justice Task Force of the United Nations' Aarhus Public Participation Convention.

During spring semester, Dave Frohnmayer was a keynote speaker at two UO conferences on green business, moderated the Oregon Law Review symposium on drug law reform, and served on the Lane County Budget Measure Ballot Explanation Committee.

In addition, Frohnmayer and his wife Lynn accompanied a UO faculty-student delegation to Oxford University, where Frohnmayer gave a lecture commemorating, among other things, the 500th anniversary of Machiavelli's The Prince. Frohnmayer also participated in a Washington D.C. Consensus Conference on clinical care guidelines for Fanconi Anemia patients, acted as an expert witness on administrative law in a major arbitration, participated in thesis defense committees of two UO Honors College students and quite possibly graded his last set of law school exams!

Erik Girvan is part of a team of researchers recently selected for a $48,499 2013 RIGE Incubating Interdisciplinary Initiatives (I3) Award. It will be used for seed funding to launch a longer-term project testing the use of restorative justice concepts and practices to reduce or eliminate racial disproportionality in school discipline decisions.

In addition, Girvan’s article “Social Science in Law: A Psychological Case for Abandoning the ‘Discrimi-natory Motive’ Under Title VII” was published in the Cleveland State Law Review. In the article, Girvan and his co-author Grace Deason describe a novel approach for using empirical social science to inform the development of legal doctrine. To illustrate the approach, they draw on the insights from decades of social-psychological research on discrimination to propose an alternative, more administrable, framework for the disparate treatment cause of action under Title VII.

Also, Girvan’s article “The Propriety of Peremptory Challenges for Perceived Personality Traits” was published by Law and Psychology Review. The article, co-authored with Robert Cramer, Tess Neal, Caroline Titcomb, and Stanley Brodsky, presents and illustrates a specific, empirically informed solution to the general controversy over use of social science in jury selection.

On April 19, Girvan presented at the Implicit Bias, Philosophy, and Psychology Conference held at the University of Sheffield in Sheffield, England. His presentation, “The Influence of Explicit and Implicit Gender Attitudes on Labor Arbitration Decisions,” reported the findings of a set of experimental and correlational studies he conducted with Grace Deason and Eugene Borgida. It is the first study of which he is aware that documents the effects of implicit biases on decisions made in actual legal cases as opposed to laboratory simulations.

In May, Carrie Leonetti was promoted to Associate Professor (with tenure) by the University of Oregon.

On April 5, Roberta Mann presented her paper, "Lighting in a Bottle: Using Tax Policy to Solve Renewable Energy's Storage Challenge" at the University of Missouri’s symposium on Promoting Sustainable Energy through Tax Policy held in Columbia.

On April 12, she presented her paper "Economists are from Mars, Lawyers are from Venus: How Communication Failure Impacts Tax Policy" at the Critical Tax Conference hosted by the University of California Hastings School of Law in San Francisco.

On May 10, Mann moderated a panel on the “Constitutional Parameters of Tax Reform” at the ABA Tax Section meeting in Washington, D.C. On May 15, she guest lectured in Professor Greg Bothun's undergraduate class Energy Footprints on the "negawatt" (the unit of energy not used).

On May 30, Mann presented her paper, "Like Water for Energy: The Water-Energy Nexus through the Lens of Tax Policy" at the Rocky Mountain Mineral Law Teachers Institute in Flagstaff, AZ. Her paper "Smart Incentives for the Smart Grid" was published in the New Mexico Law Review.

This spring, Mohsen Manesh’s draft article, “Damning Dictum: The Default Duty Debate in Delaware” was accepted for publication in the Journal of Corporation Law. In the article, Manesh savages the Delaware Supreme Court’s November 2012 decision Gatz Properties v. Auriga Capital. Building on the themes of his forthcoming article, Manesh has more recently drafted a second paper entitled “Defined by Dictum: The Geography of Revlon-Land in Cash and Mixed Consideration Transactions.” This second paper explores the use of judicial dictum to define the scope of the Revlon doctrine in Delaware corporate law. Manesh has been invited to present this draft paper at the Workshop for Corporate and Securities Litigation sponsored by the University of Illinois College of Law and University of Richmond School of Law to be held in Chicago, IL, in November. Separately, in May, Manesh was named the recipient of the 2013 Hollis Award for faculty teaching from the School of Law.

In April, Eric Priest was a panelist at the annual EXPO of the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) in Los Angeles, CA. Priest spoke on a panel titled "West Meets East: Opportunities in the Asian Pop Market." Priest also was a guest lecturer in journalism professor Kyu Ho Youm's class, Digital Freedom, where he discussed Internet censorship in China. In May, Priest was invited to present a series of lectures to University of Oregon M.B.A. students about business culture in China.

In May, Liz Tippett's article “UTSA Preemption and the Public Domain: How Courts have Overlooked Patent Preemption of State Law Claims Alleging Employee Wrongdoing” (co-authored with Charles Tait Graves) was published in the Rutgers Law Review.

Tippett was the lead author of an amicus brief filed with the U.S. Supreme Court on behalf of arbitration scholars in the case of Bakoss v. Lloyd's of London, which addressed how arbitration should be defined under the Federal Arbitration Act.

Professor Dom Vetri gave a talk on February 1 on the legal and ethical issues regarding sales of artworks from museum collections and the restrictions on the uses of such sales proceeds. The talk was a part of panel presentations at the UO Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art on the topic of “Capitalizing Collections.” Vetri has followed the talk with an article titled “Deaccession Sense” which will be published in the November issue of the peer-reviewed journal Museum & Society.

On June 26, Vetri also presented a talk at the Schnitzer Museum on issues related to stolen and looted art, entitled, “You Bought It! Do you own it?”

Merle Weiner participated in the Uniform Law Commission's Drafting Session for the new Uniform Child Custody Jurisdiction and Enforcement Act in Chicago, IL, in May. The new Act is incorporating the provisions of the Convention of 19 October 1996 on Jurisdiction, Applicable Law, Recognition, Enforcement and Co-operation in Respect of Parental Responsibility and Measures for the Protection of Children. The U.S. has signed the Convention and is expected to ratify it eventually.

Weiner also chaired a Congressional briefing on the intersection between domestic violence and the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction on June 19, 2013. Her two-hour panel was introduced by Representive Ros-Lehtinen and Representative Smith and was attended by approximately 100 people. In addition, Professor Weiner co-authored an op-ed that appeared in the Miami-Herald on June 9, 2013 entitled, "International Child Abductions: There is More to the Story." She also published a short article for advocates and practioners in the Summer Bulletin of the NYS Office for the Prevention of Domestic Violence. Finally, Professor Weiner presented a paper at the International Society of Family Law conference in Brooklyn, New York, called "Caregiver Payments: Fairness as a Principle to Promote Family Harmony."